alt Hacker NewsThe tariffs might be a bad idea, but this accusation is ridiculous. For a simple methodology like this, it's trivial to prompt engineer a LLM to produce the same response. It doesn't mean that that's how the administration came up with the policy, any more than a LLM getting the same (correct) solution as a student on an assignment means the student used a LLM on that assignment.
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croes • 04/04/2025
Seems like it's at least a plausible possibility for Paul Krugman
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-k...
I think the accusation carries more weight than you're implying because while correct answers are all similar having two students give eerily similar wrong answers is often used as evidence for cheating.
The fact that this announcement is, to put it generously, weird, and not how anyone in the real world actually implements tariffs points to this administration going with the formula from some undergrad econ textbook or econ blog they found and applying it to a spreadsheet. Maybe they got it from an LLM, maybe they didn't, but what matters is the college sophomore level of consideration of the individual tariffs.